Nice Work on Those Suspensions, ESPN

(And the statement from ESPN, via Caps Insider: "Our news desk received a call from someone representing themselves as from the Washington Post. We did not follow our own fact-checking procedures and mistakenly reported the story. When we did the proper reporting we amended it. We apologize for the error."

Not often nowadays that people want to pretend they work for a print publication. So thanks for that, false representer.

Not surprisingly they said their source was the Washington Post. Given the abundance of misinformation and "anonymous sources" used by the paper and its sports bloggers in general (LaCanfora, Yanda, etc), I'm surprised ESPN takes any info provided to them from the WaPo seriously anymore. Is Gary Williams still getting fired? Are the Redskins trading up to get Mark Sanchez? 0-for-3 WaPo. Keep up the good work.

Sports writers use anonymous sources to get information. Usually, they're scouts and other personnel people. Can you deny the Skins were trying to trade up to get Sanchez? Both Zorn and Cerrato admitted it after the fact. So it seems that Jason LaCanfora was CORRECT when he reported that the Skins would like to trade up to get the USC quarterback.

Brashear's hit wasn't even that bad! It you watch the video of it he hit him with his shoulder and not his elbow. It happened within one second of Betts having the puck (if you say "One Mississippi" or "One One-Thousand" it happens within saying that phrase.). Suspending him would be absolute B.S.!!! If anything they could fine him for his pre-game head games that he did at center ice. I guess we'll know more after his meeting at 1pm with the NHL brass.

It's hard for me to type this since ESPN is to Sport as MTV is to music, but ESPN's quality and fact-checking has been slipping recently. I was watching some of the Penn Relays(the commentators ESPN has for track & field are clueless about the sport and they used to participate) and went over to the Draft every now and then. That was the most pitiful, cynical, and depressing piece of television I have ever seen. It was as though they all took lessons from John Harkes calling MLS games. Everything was negative and half of the stuff was just wrong. I've watched the Draft in the past, but more than a couple minutes was too much for me this year. When I was paying attention to the Draft, I was watching the NFL Network. I was full of praise for their presentation until I looked up once and the production team and the director must have been getting tired and bored. They were doing camera tricks and making the heads of the people talking big... They still had more correct and unbiased factual information than the talking heads on ESPN.

I suspect this may have happened more than once, as one article by Pierre Lebrun about the Eastern Conference's goalies' performances said that after game four of the Hab-Bruins series, Price had found Bob Gainey in the stands to request a trade. By the time I was done trying to find verification for this (about 30 minutes later) and checked the article again, that part was gone.